Yesterday evening, an outage affected users of Google Reader. For a short while, subscriptions for half of Google Reader users were unaccessible. According to the Google Reader Blog, Google was "able to identify, diagnose, and fix today's outage within an hour, which is the kind of response time that we strive for."
In the blog, they also add that "We'll continue give quick status updates to problems like this in the future so users who have trusted us with their data can feel comfortable doing so."
That was definitely the case. Chris Wetherell, a Google Reader Engineer, started a post in the Google Groups alerting the community that there was indeed a problem and they were fixing it. After a short while, he posted again informing everyone that it was fixed. Now that's what I call good customer service.
Discussion continues at Google Groups.